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Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out — Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram, a tiny company dedicated to helping Thai beauty queens share photos of their fingernails.

Instagram's Buyout: No Bubble to See Here — Instagram's billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows Monday, renewing fears of a new tech bubble. But compared to other major acquisitions since the dot-com bust, turns out it's a pretty sane deal. — To put the acquisition in perspective …

Carriers Band to Fight Cellphone Theft — The nation's major wireless providers have agreed to a deal with the U.S. government to build a central database of stolen cellphones—part of a broad effort to tame an explosion of thefts nationwide. — The database, which the wireless companies …

Iran denies has plan to cut Internet access — TEHRAN — Iran has denied online reports surfacing Tuesday that it plans to cut access to the Internet in August and replace it with a national intranet, according to a statement by the ministry of communication and information technology.

iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship — When Apple introduced iTunes in 2001, it served one purpose: As a music jukebox app. Later that year, it added its most important feature: The ability to sync tracks with the just-introduced iPod. Originally, you could just drag tracks onto …

Nokia Lumia 900 hit by bug that disables data — Nokia Lumia 900 launch marred by data bug — Nokia's Lumia 900 launch has been partly soured by a bug encountered by early adopters. Both an AT&T source for Phone Arena, as well as buyers on Nokia's forums and those at WPCentral …

Toshiba introduces 13.3-inch Android 4.0 tablet, new Excite range — Toshiba announced its back-to-school tablet lineup today, adding three models to its Excite brand. The first one you'll notice is the Excite 13, which you can hardly avoid — its 13.3-inch display is absolutely enormous, nearly twice the size of a 7-inch slate.

Apple's Market Cap Hits $600 Billion — Another market cap milestone for Apple. — With the broader market in decline, shares in the company rose to a new 52-week high this morning: $644. And that jump was enough to carry Apple's market cap across the $600 billion threshold.

Why Microsoft spent $1 billion on AOL's patents — Microsoft dropped an eye-popping $1 billion on 800 AOL patents today, an astonishing amount likely spent to keep the intellectual property trove away from rival Google. — But according to a source close to the situation, Google didn't even bid on the portfolio.

About Pando — Some of you may have read Sarah Lacy's post today stating that I'm no longer on the board of Pando Daily. — This wasn't a complete surprise to me, the company notified me last week that they weren't happy that I and MG Siegler (my partner at CrunchFund) were going to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt this coming May.